New Features Coming to YouTube?

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Video hub experiments with downloading and live streaming.

By Chris Iaquinta

President Obama said change was coming, and he was right, though we doubt he was referencing YouTube when he first made that speech. Regardless, Barack Obama's YouTube channel has been chosen by Google as the testing ground for a new download option, a feature famously missing from the video hosting sites repertoire. Considering that the projected traffic for the president's channel during the inauguration today is through the roof, Google has been presented with a once in a lifetime opportunity to experiment with the download feature. The question now becomes, will this lead to a change in YouTube policy and the addition of download buttons to other videos?

Whether or not this is just an exclusive deal involving Google that will eventually disappear forever remains to be seen, but just the fact that YouTube has allowed a download option to grace one of their channels does show that in some circumstances the site may be willing to loosen some of its restrictions. If you look at the Barack Obama YouTube channel (click here.), you can see a "Click to download" link on the left side underneath the video. The downloaded video is compressed to a MPEG4 format with H.264 coded, so the quality is about as good as what you're seeing in the actual YouTube browser.

If you take a step back, you can see all the reasons why a lot of video won't be given this function, such as anything released by a film or television studio. Even though Google themselves have come up with a decent audio and video fingerprinting technology that flags copyrighted content, quick-fingered YouTube users could still use the feature to download the material before the content authors pull it down. And once a few hundred people grab it, the copyrighted material will then start to reappear on YouTube and other file sharing sites more frequently, causing a major headache for studios and producers. Our money though is riding on a hunch that YouTube will instead develop a process for pre-screening potentially downloadable content that has been pre-approved by the author. Once the video is cleared by YouTube, it will then be made live and available to users. Hmm, maybe we should pitch that idea to them ourselves.

However, downloading isn't the only road that YouTube has opened its doors to. In yet another experiment using the political world, YouTube will be launching two new web pages in conjunction with Congress this upcoming Monday, one for the House of Representatives and one for the Senate. Each Congress member will be given the opportunity to create their own channel, and then allowed complete control over it, including the ability to host live events such as a community chat.

Live broadcasting on YouTube, if done successfully here with the Senate, could become a huge asset for all kinds of different outlets. Going live at other major events (such as doing a special YouTube presentation of the Superbowl) could really open up the future of the site and how other companies perceive the number of ways they can utilize YouTube. Millions of viewers equals millions of dollars in ad revenue. You know, we really should be writing all these ideas down…oh wait, we are.

Considering why YouTube was invented in the first place, it's actually pretty exciting to see the US government taking advantage of one of the Internet's premiere websites to reach a young demographic. Stay tuned to IGN for more on the progress of President Obama's channel and any announcements involving YouTube downloading.